Computer issues hit several major airlines, FAA says
A computer problem at an outside aviation company caused flight delays for several major airlines Monday. The Federal Aviation Administration told CBS News several carriers experienced issues with a flight planning weight and balance program called Aerodata.
Mainline operations and regional operations were "impacted to varying degrees." Affected airlines included Southwest, United, JetBlue, Alaska and Delta. Delays that began appearing first in Chicago, New York, Miami and Boston spread to Dallas, Atlanta, Detroit and Washington, D.C.
As of early afternoon 3,800 U.S. flights had been delayed, according to tracking service FlightAware, though it isn't clear how many of those disruptions were due to Aerodata.
Southwest said it issued a ground stop as a result but lifted it after 40 minutes, adding it involved "an outage with a vendor that services multiple carriers with data used in flight planning.
Scattered flight delays are anticipated and Customers should check Southwest.com for the latest updates on specific flights."
Delta said, "A brief third-party technology issue that prevented some Delta Connection flights from being dispatched on time this morning has been resolved. No cancellations are expected due to the issue and our teams are working to resolve some resulting delays."
American Airlines said the problem affected several of its regional carriers that operate American Eagle flights.
